Focus
We have done some "code camps", a week at a customer location where we interact with users in the morning, and implement what they have asked for in the afternoon.
This has been great, to get direct contact with users, and face to face time with other team members. But it isn't family friendly, so I absented myself from the third one.
I have to do less and less managing of the project, so I'd actually making more of a technical contribution now than earlier. And mostly the code camp went fine without me, but the after action review pointed to one problem.
They say they failed to focus on the tasks that were deliverable in a week. This seems credible: one contribution I still make is to focus the discussion: "These are important issues but they aren't for the next release. What should we do next?"
The developers prioritise their individual work well. How can I transfer the skill of focussing a team effort?
I've just started reading "In Over our Heads: the mental demands of modern life" by Robert Kegan. He discusses personal development as repeatedly attaining a meta-level, in which elements of your subjectivity become objects you can think about. So far, it seems like it might contain some answers about acheiving maturity at work.
Focus?
Programmers are often accused of "focusing" on things they find interesting and ignoring the "business problem".
It's not as if they are unequal to the task of "objectifying their subjectivity", thinking precisely about what inside other peoples' minds are inchoate concepts, and mere anxieties.
Indeed, good programmers have learned techniques for problem analysis on the job so well that they seek out the more challenging ways to use those skills.
The problem is that *ways of focus* can estrange end users and managers, who ask "why is it necessary to use a parser generator to generate the problem solution?" Why not just SOLVE THE PROBLEM directly, using fast and dirty code?
The very process you recommend, Chris, by adding words (expanding the problem STATEMENT to a verbose problem SOLUTION with by definition more words) seems to complicate things because to the terminally unfocused, words==concepts.
In love with Occam's Razor, he then accuses the programmer of multiplying entities unnecessarily, because the folk view of language is that grammar is unnecessary and each word, like each worker, should pay its own way...and not depend on other words.